To Jesus it was the familiar tone of His Father’s voice, to others it sounded like the voice of an angel, “but some said it thundered.” John’s account of this story (12:27-31) reveals how easy it is to bring a secular mindset to spiritual realities. The more so because, as Jesus said, “This voice was for your benefit.” Something designed to awaken their God-consciousness was processed through the machinery of worldly wisdom and stripped of its true meaning; supernatural revelation was robbed of its significance by naturalistic interpretation.
For Jesus there was no problem. He knew every inflexion of that voice, from its tenderest whisper to its mightiest utterance of creative power. Out of an eternal intimacy with the Father, an intimacy sustained through night long times of prayer and constant daily conversation through His earthly life, He knew every cadence and sensitively read every nuance of meaning in the voice of God. Just as lovers exchange wordless glances, He and the Father needed no audible exchange - it was for the crowd’s sake that the voice was heard.
Some people, at least, sensed that there was more to it than just physical noise. Hovering on the edge of spiritual reality, they attributed it to some vague possibility of angelic activity, but the rest could think only in materialistic terms. Their “theology of thunder” effectively deafened them to the voice of God even though He was speaking directly to them. For them everything had to have a natural explanation. Only the intellectually naive would think in terms of angels and supernatural powers. They were earthbound, their horizons determined by their five senses - what could be seen, heard, touched, tasted and smelt. Beyond those horizons there was no meaningful reality. “A voice from heaven? Rubbish! Be real! It was just thunder.”
Nicodemus was on the verge of missing the truth of the new birth by interpreting the Lord Jesus’ words from a naturalistic viewpoint: “Can a man enter his mother’s womb a second time..?” (John 3:4). Leading academic theologian though he was, his secular mindset inhibited his spiritual apprehension. His counterparts are still around.
At a different intellectual level altogether, but with the same secular mindset, the woman at the well nearly missed the offer of living water from Jesus by a similar materialistic approach to His words. “You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?” (John 4:11).
Even those who experienced His miracles at close hand could not wriggle free from this soul-deadening materialism. Behind their apparent enthusiasm for Him He detected ulterior motives: “You are looking for me, not because you saw the miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill” (John 6:25-27). They had taken part in one of the most astounding miracles, but had failed totally to see any spiritual significance in the broken bread and fish. It never occurred to them that there was another dimension lying beyond the merely physical. In any case, they were happy enough just to have their physical needs satisfied. In their reckoning, grub meant more than God.
The sneering critics on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:12,13) made the same mistake. Confronted by the “new thing” that God was doing through the outpouring of the Spirit, they interpreted the unusual manifestations on the basis of a worldly mindset. To them it could only be drunkenness. While others were at least prepared to ask, “What does this mean?” they dismissed it out of hand. Their descendants are still with us.
Yet again, on a higher intellectual level, the philosophers of Athens were divided over the issue of the resurrection of Jesus (Acts 17:32), some saying, “We want to hear you again on this subject,” but others sneering because such an idea went beyond the parameters of “scientific” credibility. Resurrection was unthinkable because there was no natural explanation for it. Paul’s question to king Agrippa emphasises the arrogance of unbelief: “Why should it be thought incredible by you that God raises the dead?” Acts 26:- emphasis mine).
The disturbing thing is that “thunder theology” is still with us. It is reflected in the way so many modern theologians have sought to extract the supernatural content from Christian faith. Blinded by “science”, so called, they have abandoned belief in the miracles of the Bible and in so doing have been forced to question its Divine inspiration and final authority. What was once the “canon” by which all revelation and teaching was judged has itself been subjected to a higher authority - that of human reason. If it doesn’t square with the latest findings of the world of secular science then it must be abandoned or at least re-interpreted. This all sounds highly sophisticated and intellectually respectable - until, that is, “the latest findings of science” are discovered to be the latest theories presented as facts for popular consumption but not universally accepted amongst scientists themselves, the theory of evolution being a classic example of this.
What is often forgotten is the fact that, because a man works in a laboratory, writes (deeply impressive scientific textbooks or appears on TV as an “expert”, he is not necessarily free from prejudice or immune from making unproven assumptions. He is certainly not omniscient and most certainly not infallible. “The best of men are only men at best.” It would be totally unfair to suggest that most scientific thinking is dishonest, but what we must remember is that the term “science says”, which to many people means, “this is the final word”, can really only mean, “at its present state of knowledge science believes...”. As Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones pointed out years ago, what are called “the assured results of scientific investigation” today, may well be modified by further discoveries or abandoned altogether tomorrow. John Blanchard, in his superb book “Does God Believe in Atheists?” quotes James Le Fanu’s comments in 1996 about modern discoveries in cosmology, molecular biology and neuro physiology, in which he says they “had the effect of reconciling science with religion in a way that was totally unexpected, ‘undermining the scientific certainties of the past hundred years’” (our italics). Like an elastic tape-measure, science expands and contracts over the passage of time and provides no final answers to the riddle of life. Or, as Paul would put it, “through the wisdom of God, the world in its wisdom did not know Him”. When, therefore, we insist on making human reason the test and interpreter of Divine revelation we are simply using the wrong criteria. It is like studying the stars through a microscope. After contemplating the vastness of the universe, Job cries, “These are but the outer fringe of His works; how faint the whisper we hear of Him! Who then can understand the thunder of His power?” (Job 26:14). The trouble is, we think we can, and so we lose the ability to hear His voice and respond to its truth.
It is easy to point out the errors of Biblical characters or contemporary unbelievers, but not always so easy to sense the subtle drift of our own scepticism when God speaks to us.
“Some said it thundered” because they had no clear notion of anything that could be experienced outside our normal standards of awareness - sight, hearing, taste, touch, etc. Everything had to be judged by the “normal” powers of observation open to human beings. Anything beyond that had to fit into that framework of normality and was either explained in natural terms or re-interpreted in a way acceptable to human reason. Therefore, since the supernatural realm cannot exist, the so-called “voice from heaven” must have been thunder. There could be no other rational explanation. The modern “scientific” mind would be in perfect agreement.
On this premise, many evolutionists see the “spiritual” realm of human consciousness as simply the result of the random interaction of certain chemical functions in the brain cells, while many psychologists would dismiss religious conversion as a form of brainwashing. Meanwhile the media wheels out its teams of “experts” to pronounce on every aspect of human experience with airy generalisations based on equally dubious assumptions. Miracles of healing are explained away as “remission”, demonic activity as “mediaeval superstition”, and signs and wonders as “having a perfectly natural explanation”, or, more likely, as “the result of biased reporting”. On that last point, it is interesting to note that such dismissive judgment is never, of course, the result of “biased interpretation”!
Explaining away supernatural phenomena as always having “a perfectly natural explanation” is not, however, the exclusive attitude of sworn unbelievers or liberal theologians. It occurs, alarmingly at times, amongst people who claim to be Bible-believing Christians. It is one thing to denounce modernists and their ilk for unfaithfulness to the Word, but quite another to be uncompromisingly faithful to the Bible when it comes to certain issues that touch the nerve of modern sensibility. In other words, it is just as easy for us to explain away certain Scriptures because they challenge us. The “cessationists” have been doing this with 1 Corinthians 12-14 and other Scriptures about spiritual gifts for many years. Abandoning their usually careful interpretation of the Scriptures, they endeavour to extract the supernatural content of Christian life and experience by arguing that those passages were applicable only to the early Church period and no longer apply to the modern Church.
In some evangelical circles the Biblical teaching about hell and eternal punishment are being questioned; not so much, it would seem, from the weight of Biblical evidence, but more from the psychological and ethical emphases of modern philosophical attitudes. Can modern Christians subscribe any longer to such a horrifying concept as the eternal punishment of unrepentant sinners? In this case, are we only hearing the thunder of judgment and missing the voice of mercy? Or is it that we don’t like the thunder and put our fingers in our theological ears by explaining it away as a distant echo from the past and no longer part of today’s warmer climate?
Re-interpreting the Scriptures in order to make them fit modern thinking not only relates to the supernatural elements, but also to their moral and ethical content. What once was heard as the voice of God is often now re-classified as moral thunder which expressed the values of a bygone age but is no longer applicable to modern society. “You can’t apply those standards in today’s world,” or, “The social and political conditions have changed so much since Bible days that much of it no longer applies to us,” are the kinds of arguments used to justify standards of behaviour that no longer reflect New Testament holiness.
“Thunder theology” not only dismisses the possibility of the supernatural; it also has a neat way of explaining away the Word of God by forcing it into a framework determined by the cultural preferences and intellectual prejudices of the day. The tragedy is that we hear the voice that speaks for our benefit but cleverly avoid its truth by putting our own “spin” on it. That is why Jesus said, “Consider carefully what you hear” (Mark 4:24 NIV).
We can so easily fail to hear what God is saying for our benefit because we insist on subjecting Him to our traditional ways of thinking (see Mark 7:8) or by insisting on trying to interpret supernatural truth by conventional wisdom - the secular mindset. Consequently we only hear thunder, when we should be listening to God.
In the end, the question is, “What does the Bible actually say?”, not “What would I like it to say?” Or, “What is the Spirit saying to the churches?”, not “What would I feel more comfortable with?” In other words, don’t limit God. After all, “Why should you think it incredible for God to do something you didn’t expect or can’t explain?”
